Monday, January 16, 2012

On Propaganda

Searching systematically through news headlines of major global newspapers provides concrete evidence of a media cover-up of the severity of the Fukushima disaster and the reality of ongoing radiation releases.

For instance, in June the Daily Yomiuri reported "melt-through" at Fukushima. Although this story was repeated in the British press (The Guardian) and in Australia, only 1 US newspaper reported the news and they buried it on page 10 in an article with a rather dull title. Below find the Yomiuri story and the 1 report in the US, found in the Washington Post:

[excerpted] "As the disaster unfolded, Japanese authorities relied on computer models and uncertain data while trying to assess the full scope of the damage to the reactor cores. Even now, it will probably be years before guesses about units 1, 2 and 3 turn into facts. But the government's admission Tuesday of a possible melt-through reaffirmed assumptions held by outside scientists.

"It's much like the Japanese government conceding that gravity is a possibility," David Lochbaum, an independent nuclear power expert, wrote in an e-mail. "Studies for decades have consistently concluded that a reactor core without cooling and makeup will overheat, melt, slump to the bottom of the reactor vessel, and burn through the vessel wall and drop on to the drywell floor."

MORE PROPAGANDA FROM JACZKO WHILE VISITING UK

“Visiting U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko said 20 December that there was no longer enough energy in the reactors at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant to produce an offsite release of radiation, but pointed out that a large cleanup task remained.”

[EXCERPTED] "Only the people on the net paid attention to the data and it was not reported by the MSM. The Ministry of Education and Science issued the result of the fallout measurement, without saying anything as to why these dates (12/27/2011 to date) are being singled out.

This person tweeted the pic with three overlapping charts comparing (from the top): (1) amount of snow on the ground and amount of rain, (2) amount of cesium fallout, and (3) wind speed (average speed in black, maximum speed in blue, and maximum instantaneous speed in red), from December 1, 2011 to January 6, 2012"

The spike happened one day after the pretty big earthquake (seismic
intensity scale 4) on January 1, 2012, which caused the water level of
the Skimmer Surge Tank of Reactor 4 to fluctuate unexpectedly.

About Me

I am a Professor at a large public university. I study political economy and biopolitics (the politics of life). My interests are diverse but are broadly concerned with economic, social and environmental justice. I have published 5 books: Crisis Communication, Liberal Democracy and Ecological Sustainability: The Threat of Financial and Energy Complexes in the Twenty-First Century (2016); Fukusima and the Privatization of Risk (2013); Constructing Autism (2005); Governmentality, Biopower and Everyday Life (2008/2011); Governing Childhood (2010).
I also participated in an edited collection on Fukushima: Fukushima: Dispossession or Denuclearization (2014).